Our power grid can’t take the heat — can cooler heads in DC fix the problem?

By Tara D. Sonenshine

Amid all the horrors of last week’s assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump is a dangerous ongoing heat wave that is engulfing the nation, making temperatures — and tempers — soar.

In an Oval Office address on Sunday night, President Biden asked Americans to “lower the temperature,” meaning politically charged rhetoric. But we also have literal temperature problems due to loss of power.

This week in Chicago, more than 300,000 people lost power thanks to tornadoes. And when Hurricane Beryl barreled through Texas with pounding rain and high winds over a week ago, the storm left 2.7 million people in the Houston area without power, forcing some residents to sleep in cars. The hurricane caused one of the biggest-ever power outages for the Texas utility company, CenterPoint Energy, in one of America’s most populous cities.

The question is, will we lose electricity in the days and years ahead at a faster and more dangerous rate due to factors like climate change? And what can be done about it?

A new study by the Electric Power Research Institute and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory looked at how cities may be affected by future hurricanes, imagining the period between 2066 and 2100 and expected outage events per person per decade. “Our results show a dramatic increase in risk along the entirety of the U.S. coastline, particularly in the Gulf Coast, Florida, and Puerto Rico,” they report, ”driven by an increase in the number of tropical cyclones and major hurricanes expected in a future climate.”

More measured predictions, but no less worrisome, come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which expects above-average turbulence from warming waters, thanks to an 85 percent chance of higher-than-normal hurricanes for 2024.

Bad weather is stressing an already-stressed American power grid — one that is decades old at a time when we want more electricity, despite a shortage of power lines.

According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the forecast for U.S. electricity demand has already started growing, from 2.6 percent to 4.7 percent over the next five years.

Another report, by Grid Strategies, puts it bluntly: “the era of flat power demand is over.” The U.S. is not prepared for the load growth.

Climate Central, an independent nonprofit organization, makes clear that weather variability explains most power outages: “Of all major U.S. power outages reported from 2000 to 2023, 80 percent (1,755) were due to weather-related events.”

Data centers and artificial intelligence are key stressors on the U.S. electricity grid, with consumption predicted to double from 2022 levels by 2030. Part of that is due to the power needed to fuel large language models such as ChatGPT, employing what some estimate to be 25 times the power used in an average Google search.

Solutions lie in individual behavior and national policy, which is why we need to closely watch both political conventions this summer to see how each presidential candidate and his respective party plans to tackle the problem.

President Biden has recognized the importance of human behavior in climate change, working with other countries to address it by being part of the Paris Agreement, signed by 196 parties in 2015.

Trump, who pulled America out of that same Paris agreement when in office, selected his choice for vice president on Monday, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio). Vance has said he is “skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man.”

What is clear from all the science is that we, as a nation, must come together around shared ideas and find a middle ground in a divided America on climate and electricity. Hurricanes cost lives and money: Damage from weather and climate disasters in this country from 1980 through last August is estimated at $2.6 trillion. And heat is dangerous. Burn centers around the U.S. are admitting more and more patients — many needing ICU care and surgery, including skin grafts.

If we can agree that weather and electricity matter, with the population in American cities growing, heat rising and grids failing, we can use our power to prevent disasters.

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Tara D. Sonenshine is senior nonresident fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.